Tonight on 4th Avenue: Victor LaValle and Robert Lopez

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Tonight at the Pacific Standard Fiction Series in Brooklyn, Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine (which, according toEdan boasts “one of the best voices to come out of literature in the last…oh, ever, probably”), will be reading with Robert Lopez, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River. As usual, I’ll be hosting; it would be great to see you there. For more information, seeTime Out New York.

This quick-and-dirty Timesarticle about a crackdown on fake reviews includes one of the best sentences to appear in the Gray Lady of late: “Faking reviews often begins with faked reviews of the company faking the reviews.”

This article on M.F.K. Fisher, the godmother of American food writing, should be catnip for those of you who like reading about food almost as much as eating it. A onetime French expat, Fisher conducted “a one-woman revolution in the field of literary cookery,” most notably with her collection of essays The Gastronomical Me. (Back in 2010, Jessica Ferriwrote about Fisher for The Millions.)

Surely you’ve heard the hype by now. Surely you’ve seen someone blushing and shifting their eyes askance while reading this book in public. Well, now you can get a taste of what the fuss is all about. You can read the beginning of Alissa Nutting’sTampa courtesy of Dzanc Books and The Collagist.

As predicted, Haruki Murakami is hard at work on volume three of 1Q84. The Japan Times reports that the finale (?) of Murakami's latest novel is slated to come out in Japanese next summer. Still no word on when we'll see it in English.